December 2nd, 2008

Zoho's CloudSQL: a real step forward

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 5:55 am

Categories: Development tools, Office productivity

Tags: SQL, Cloud, Zoho, Smb/Sme, Databases, Programming Languages, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management, Software Development

Zoho just can’t stop churning out software. Today it is launching the Zoho CloudSQL. Put simply, this is the first step to providing a cloud based integration framework that allows developers to pass data between Zoho applications and their own. This is exciting stuff.  For the first time, a commercial software vendor is providing an easy way to interoperate with its applications without imposing an entry or exit visa tax.

From the release:

1. It’s the first technology that allows customers to interact with their data on the cloud, from another cloud application or from an on-premises one through real SQL.
2. It supports multiple SQL dialects. We support all the major (and even some not so major) ones: ANSI, Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Informix.
3. With our JDBC/ODBC drivers, developers can access data in the cloud just as easily as if it were stored in a local database.

I caught up with Raju Vegesna to get a feel of what the company intends: “You can think of CloudSQL as a linking mechanism for things like QuickBooks or any application that wants to talk to and from Zoho data.” That’s exactly where I hoped Zoho would position the service. 

Like it or not, cloud based accounting (AaaS anyone?) is a niche area with the world remaining firmly in on-premise land. While I see plenty of examples coming out to address the SMB market, it’s going to take time before finance types will trust corporate transaction data in the Internet cloud. Making it easy to consume services in an integrated manner without the distinction of whether the data is on premise or in the cloud is an incredibly smart move. It means that you don’t have to throw out your existing accounting applications if you don’t want to while opening up the business to other scloud ervices that are gaining traction. The obvious candidate is CRM but it could equally be SCM or talent management.

I also asked Raju what will happen with existing Zoho applications. Right now, they represent a great toolkit but little integration work has been done to turn them into a ready to consume suite of services. “The company has made a start by demoing a simple report demo but yes over time we plan to use CloudSQL as the integration point for all the apps.”

CloudSQL is a development environment and not for the end user. Its potential to open up a whole ecosystem category of its own is enormous. The big complaint of all business users is the general lack of integration capabilities between different applications. Taking this step puts Zoho out in front with something that has broad appeal, including the open source crowd.

However, before running off thinking this is some sort of Holy Grail, integration calls for much more than a few SQL calls and a Web API. Orchestrating services and events is where larger businesses would like to be. Even so, it gives the SMB a real chance to mix ‘n’ match services the way they want to get things done. In that regard, it removes vendor lock-in and allows for the emergence of genuine vertical market applications on a scale we’ve not seen in the past.

It will be interesting to see how Zoho follows this up and how it supports the ecosystem that congregates around its API.

November 21st, 2008

Enterprise 2.0 solution reduces email abuse

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 7:19 am

Categories: Mobile, Office productivity

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 Solution, E-mail, Online Communications, Zack Whittaker

We now live in a day and age where we can expect to get dozens, if not hundreds of emails a day. Most of these you’ll find are replies and forwarded emails - emails which you have already responded to and are following up, or emails which have been passed onto you because you’re more of a relevant person to deal with it.

Taglocity works on Outlook 2003/2007, and works as an Enterprise 2.0 solution, allowing the user to prioritise email, and deal with email in a more productive way. Instead of abandoning and forgetting about email days down the line, this solution allows even the most busy of people to organise, prioritise and deal with email.

Being unique in business practise isn’t always useful. Using bad practises of email management has become a social norm, and are more than happy to hit that “reply all” button, even though those people don’t need to see it. People are thinking too socially and less business like; replying to everyone so “everyone can get the message plus smiley face”, when a single email to the sender of the original message is all that is needed.

This not only clogs up your email, it clogs up your business day. Everyone wishes they had more hours in the day, and at times you’ll find you’ve got more coming in than you have going out. Oh trust me, whilst saving the world in my day job and university student the rest of the time, I know how that feels.

Every time you get an email through, simply create a tag for it and a whole load of options are available for it. You can mark them all as read, set appointments and flags for the message, move them, delete them, and even allow them to “travel with you”, so they can be aggregated on other Outlook screens. These can be shared with others, and search all of your tags with smart folders.

From the website:

“From ‘push’ only to ‘push’ and ‘pull’ thereby giving people more control over their own attention and enabling on-demand knowledge discovery and sharing to all stakeholders. In addition to being able to quickly find needed information, information should also ‘find’ people based on their criteria and terms.”

It’s a brilliant little tool which uses little-to-no memory, and has saved me hours already, especially with the amount of crap I get in my inbox.

November 12th, 2008

JobBlogs: Facebook for business

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 2:38 pm

Categories: Office productivity, Social computing

Tags: Facebook, Software-as-a-service, File Server, Workspace, File Servers, Software As A Service (SaaS), Team Management, Cloud Computing, Blogging, Storage Management

I’ve been a little busy over the last few weeks, but it hasn’t all been drinking and partying. I’ve been looking into JobBlogs, which has a highly innovative SaaS appliance, which blends together customer relation management and project management, with social media within business as a main selling point, into one central application. As they so delicately describe it:

“It serves up an intuitive, comprehensive and fast workspace tailored to meet universal team challenges. Contacts, plans, activities, tasks, documents and schedules, are easily organized and tracked throughout the work flow.”

But it’s not just that. It feels, from the very beginning of using this application, like an online operating system; a mesh for the masses, or a screen away from your computer. The user interface is fantastic. It has a very Windows-style feel to it, making sure the user feels safe and comforted knowing the environment even before they use it. You can even customise the wallpaper that you have - a very un-business like quality, but gives it that edge over other competing products.

It’s a fresh way to look at things; integrated blog management to keep on track of projects and let others know how things are stewing. You can create and manage workspaces, tags, business processes - someone even quoted this as being “like Facebook for business”. It also boasts:

“…customer relationship management (CRM), intranet, contact database, content management system and file server requirements.”

It runs within your browser with a SaaS element to it, is incredibly easy to set up and worth the cheap cost to run it all. This could well be a user integral part of any organisation - keeping people connected, up to date, understanding and safe knowing their storage is secure.

It’s worth looking into at very least. This’ll be something I’ll personally be keeping in my bookmarks for a later date.

October 31st, 2008

No recession in Joyent's cloud

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 10:45 am

Categories: Office productivity

Tags: Financial, Recession, Data Centers, Financial Accounting, E-mail, Cloud Computing, Storage, Hardware, Data Management, Finance

Rod Boothby at Joyent (disclosure: Rod is also a fellow Irregular) sent me the above graph showing how Joyent is profiting from the downturn in the economy. The reasons are not hard to fathom.

Despite the economic downturn, organizations still need to get things done and still need data center scalability. However they are turning their attention to providers that can quickly provision and which do not require capital expenditure. In email to me, Rod says: “In uncertain economic times, the move from capital expenses into operating expenses not only makes it easier to get new projects off the ground, but it also reduces the risks associated with running a new project. If the new application fails, clients can simply cancel their cloud infrastructure.”

Also see: Cloud computing: Will the financial geeks give it a boost?

October 28th, 2008

SlideRocket presents from the cloud

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 12:59 pm

Categories: Office productivity

Tags: Microsoft PowerPoint, Presentation, SlideRocket, Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software, Zack Whittaker

Something that I can’t seem to avoid when writing a post on here are the words, “collaboration”, “interoperability” and “productivity”. These are, however, essential parts in the enterprise industry and a step closer to a fully fledged Enterprise 2.0 application.

SlideRocket is a Web 2.0 application which integrates enterprise relating features, to allow you to create, manage, share and present online presentations. You can import presentations from offline to online, and you can just as easily export presentations from online to offline.

The key features to point out is that you can access your presentations from anywhere in the world. No more will you need to email things to yourself, save things in a server share or carry round your flash drive with you. It’s an online presentation service which stores your presentations, and lets you edit and present them afterwards. The website address is all you’ll need when going into a meeting.

The entire interface is, dare I say it, gorgeous. It’s slick, smooth, gentle on the eyes, and all Flash based so everything works as soon as you want it to. If anything, it actually seems to work better than PowerPoint offline. With all of the features that PowerPoint has, it’s a much more economically viable option than buying even a basic version of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite.

You can still share your documents with others, setting permissions on slides and objects within your presentation to make sure others can’t screw with your work. Transitions, tables, shapes, Flash plugins, other plugins, audio, themes, text, pictures and themes are thrown in there, making this a highly functional web application.

After using this software for the last day, revising and catching up on university work, involving a lot of PowerPoint deck creation and modification - I can honestly say this is something I would continue using. However, I’d want all of the features but I don’t want to pay for it.

Regardless of business structure or employee numbers, there are three tariffs which seem to fit most people for pricing. Free, Individual at $10 a month, and Business at $20 per user a month - which all offer more and more, depending on how much you want to pay. There are plenty of demos of the application available on their website, and much more information lying around the place.

On a closing thought, with the recent news that Office 14, the next version of the Microsoft Office system, will come with a set of lightweight web editions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote, maybe this start-up won’t be lasting as long as I hope it will.

October 27th, 2008

The Expense Tracker: as it should be

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 11:13 am

Categories: Office productivity

Tags: Taxes, Financial Accounting, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Financial Planning, Finance, Emerging Technologies, Dennis Howlett

Earlier today I spoke with Eric Tippetts, VP of marketing at VOICE2Insights, a Utah based company that has developed The Expense Tracker. This is a voice activated system that helps you to record expenses as you go. The system also allows you to enter online or via text messages. According to Tippett: “We found that different demographies have different data entry preferences so we give them the choice.”

At times like now when money is tight, The Expense Tracker is a good way to help people keep on top of their finances. When you first sign up, it provides a budget based on surveyed information the company obtained from 25 finance specialists. Users can modify the individual expense line items to suit their own spending patterns.

Rather than simply recording expenses, The Expense Tracker sends users a daily reminder to let them know how much is left in the spending budget. “We found that when the family sits down to go through expenses at month end there’s always a fight. This way, you can’t get away from it.” That’s certainly true though I wonder whether some people might find that reminder annoying.

At year end, users can obtain an Excel formatted spreadsheet that can be handed over to tax preparers. Tippetts says there is an API so that developers of other services can add this into their own offerings. Assuming the API works well then any number of services like FreshBooks or QuickBooks could take advantage of The Expense Tracker.

Users can choose between a 6 month plan at $59.70 or pay-as-you-go at $14.95 plus a one time setup fee of $9.95. For those amounts, The Expense Tracker guarantees to help you find un-necessary spend.

For the future, the company is going to add in debt reduction calculators: “Making people aware that if they put a little more on their credit cards, how fast things get paid off.” Next the company plans to add value by offering opportunities to get essentials at a discounted rate. Finally, they want to trend the nation and states to see how users compare with others in the nation and in their home states. Finally, they are finding demand from other countries and are working on an internationalization program that will include SIP dial-in.

Does this sound like a near perfect solution? The only thing that’s missing is the ability to save or copy expense documents and have them managed by an online drop box. The user still has to keep hold of receipts, something we’re all pretty ill disciplined at doing. However, as a first step towards pro-active budgeting where the service nags me daily then it might just represent the impetus people need to get serious about expense management.

October 23rd, 2008

PBWiki: growing in a recession

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 1:23 pm

Categories: Office productivity, Social computing

Tags: Collaboration, Recession, Environment, PBWiki, Chris Yeh, Wiki, Marketing Research, Online Communications, Marketing, Dennis Howlett

Earlier today I had a conversation with Chris Yeh, VP enterprise marketing at PBWiki. He brings an honesty and refreshing spirit to the business of building a startup.

PBWiki is a company that everyone kinda knows but doesn’t always see. They’re not big on the blah-blah circuit because as Chris points out, you tend to see the same faces and these events have a navel gazing quality to them. I was interested to hear how the company is doing, where its focus is coming from and how it sees the future. Bear in mind the wiki market is crowded yet at the same time wiki represents one of the few areas where you can argue that enterprise adoption has taken a reasonable hold.

Asked about PBWiki’s approach to market, Chris had this to say: “You have to say that you’re going to solve this specific problem for this specific audience. We have a very specific focus for people who are trying to do collaboration across boundaries. Solutions that you bring in house have a very difficult time dealing with people from multiple enterprises.”

Chris cited the example of SAP where they together with CapGemini in the UK are using PBWiki to reach out to customers raqhter than using in house existing solutions. He also said there are instances of PBWiki running inside Google: “How long that will continue is another matter,” he quipped. Yet another use case is in the mortgage industry where customers who have been rejected try hopping from one provider to another in the expectation that the providers won’t share information. All in, Chris claims that PBWiki now has 5-6,000 paying customers from a total of 400,000 who have signed up, paying on average around $1,000 a year.

Chris’s focus the last year has been about moving the company from what was once perceived as a consumer play to more of a business specific value proposition. “In the last year we’ve grown from a handful of people to just under 30. Most of those are in support and sales plus some marketing. We didn’t have any of those functions. We did that because it was obvious there just isn’t that much money in ad support revenues.” Looking at the company website, it is clear they’re doing something right because the company is still hiring. Even so, Chris is not sitting on his laurels: “These things take a long time to come hit you and even though we’re continuing to do better and better, you just don’t know when or if the recession will bite so I’m cautious.”

Asked why PBWiki is adopting a more traditional approach to market Chris noted that once you get to around the $500 to $1,000 mark, people tend to want to talk with someone about the product: “The amount of business we get from California is minuscule. Our primary markets in the US are the east coast, Texas, the mid-west and Europe.”

This was particularly interesting to me as I have recently questioned the Gen Y adoption argument. Chris said that while it is true Gen Y’ers don’t want to talk with people and that they will buy online, we’re a long way off seeing that as a mainstream form of activity. “I’m sure over time we’ll move to a model where there are less direct sales people per dollar income but that’s a long way out,” he suggested.

The more interesting part of our conversation though came from a discussion around business models and attitudes to software creation. “Free is not a business model, it’s a marketing device. The Bay Area echo chamber believes it can build its own. Trying to convince our engineering team to use outside products is like pulling teeth. There’s a strong belief that every product should be free, anything can be done with open source and whatever we do we’re smarter than anyone else. I want profit motive because the company that has to support demanding customers is going to put the best product out there. That requires money.”

Looking to the future, Chris said the company is focusing on those businesses that have teams of 5-100 people that have to operate in cross boundary environments: “We put the emphasis on hosted collaboration rather than just wiki because we have to think about how does this interact with the primary collaboration environment which is email. How can we make the two work together more effectively.”

I admire Chris’s ‘what’s on the street’ practical approach and refreshingly honest assessment of what it takes to build a sustainable startup. Too often I hear startups wanting to change the world when you just know that however smart the idea, they’re not where their target market is thinking.

October 13th, 2008

Egnyte: using and sustaining Enterprise 2.0

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 2:03 pm

Categories: Mobile, Office productivity

Tags: Apple iPhone, On-demand, Server, Enterprise 2.0, Egnyte, Backup Facility, Storage, Backups, Hardware, Zack Whittaker

Egnyte, in a nutshell, is a software as a service, cloud storage application. But it’s a lot more than just that. It feels like your online home of files, storage and where you put your valuables.

Egnyte started out because the small business, which is roughly between 1 and 250 employees is a unique market and sensitive to investments, but generally there seems to be a low IT competence. With the advancements of technology and broadband getting faster, storage seemed less of a commodity. The world is getting more mobile with working from home, tele-working and commuting twice a day. The enterprise and small-medium market is accepting a more on-demand solution, and with this, Egnyte was created.

The service is an on-demand infrastructure with increased mobility, Web 2.0 sharing, virtual collaborative teams and on-demand storage. A unique solution is needed to support complex business needs and expanding business model.

If you read all that and thought, “yawn, you mentioned business related words, I’m switching off”, it bores me too. However take this on board instead. It’s basically Live Mesh but so much better and will probably always be better. I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed using Egnyte, which is something I can not always say about every product I’m pushed.

Egnyte is primarily an on-demand file server. In an ordinary on-site enterprise you’ll get sharing issues, backup issues and disaster recovery, security flaws which need patching, remote access violations and all other kinds of crap a workplace doesn’t need.

Egnyte eliminates the need for:

• physical servers
• backups
• added hardware
• maintenance overheads, as after all, a small-medium business doesn’t need these clogging up the workplace, as well as the financial impact.

It works excellently, if not specifically, for branch and distributed geographic offices, includes secure desktop and web access, has built-in disaster recovery, works incredibly well with sharing large files through direct transfer or hotlink sending and has a comprehensive auditing capability.

SaaS, security and file storage –>

October 6th, 2008

Startups listen up: you've got a pricing problem

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 12:33 pm

Categories: Office productivity

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Small And Medium Enterprise, Web Application, Pricing Strategy, Phil Wainewright, Pricing, Smb/Sme, Marketing Research, Marketing, Dennis Howlett

Just about every new product coming to market is being offered as a service rather than packaged software. But pricing remains something of a mystery. A while back, I started a spreadsheet that plots price points for different saas accounting offerings. At the time I concluded that no-one has figured out a viable model that could be generalized for the whole market. Despite it is far from complete and out of date, I believe the same still holds true.

What’s more, economic factors will bring the topic into sharper focus as the anticipated recession forces enterprises to evaluate capital IT investments. Check out what happened to SAP earlier today to get a feel for what is happening. That should be good news for saas vendors but is it?

Phil Wainewright speculates that Zoho may have developed a model that allows it to take advantage of the freemium approach such that it can outgrow Salesforce.com. In one sense that doesn’t surprise me. The SMB market at which Zoho is aimed is huge and in marked contrast to the upper mid-tier and above that, until recently has been Salesforce’s focus. Its pricing reflects its focus with the professional edition coming in at $65/month/user for basic SFA, call center and 10 custom tabs.

At first glance that sounds enticing but a number of customers have told me that to get ‘real’ value, they need to be paying upwards of $100/month. Even then that doesn’t sound bad compared to enterprise on-premise pricing which can easily run the equivalent of $200/month for the license fee and then a further $44 for maintenance and support for CRM packages. On that basis, the saas solution is still cost effective after three and a half years before tasking into account data center and infrastructure costs.

That argument doesn’t take into account the relative simplicity of today’s saas offerings compared to their more mature on-premise cousins. That’s an argument for another day. For the purposes of this discussion, I am assuming relatively straightforward functionality for an SME. In other words, the vast majority of the market by volume. Back to the plot.

But then along come companies like Method Integration telling me they can offer CRM style integration to QuickBooks as a service for $45/month for the first user and $20/month for subsequent users. That’s a pretty good deal but I still think it needs to come down. QuickBooks can be readily be used by companies trading up to $20-25 million a year without much trouble and has the benefit of a low cost add-in payroll. But adding in say 20-30 sales people using Method is going to add $425 to $625/month to the customer’s bill. Less than Salesforce.com but will this type of business fork over these amounts of scarce cash? I doubt it.

Just as the number of even $10/month /user services can rise rapidly when scaling to hundreds or thousands of users, this form of flat pricing seems doomed to survive except for all of the smallest or niche saas offerings. Price breaks will have to be metered into the charging equation at the very least.

Already we’re seeing pressure build. Only today, Caspio, which provides a ‘do-it-yourself database for rapid web application creation’ announced an effective 50% price reduction, starting at $39.95/month for small businesses. From the release: “Unlike other offerings which charge per user and create a formidable cost to businesses, Caspio allows any number of employees, partners, members or customers to access web applications at no extra charge.”

On-demand/saas systems are opening up a world of opportunity for both buyers and sellers. Custom apps at affordable prices and a cornucopia of choice upon which the SME can gorge are but two of the alluring factors that should drive growth. But when it all comes together, if the cost is too high in aggregate then those same SMEs will make the same tough choices their larger brethren are making. That’s why prices need to come down further.

The volume is there for any entrepreneurial vendor to have a good shot at achieving decent market share. But it will require invention in business models and a willingness to trade something other than direct cash.

October 3rd, 2008

Enterprise 2.0 and business collaboration

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 2:23 pm

Categories: Office productivity, Social computing

Tags: Security, Microsoft SharePoint, Enterprise 2.0, Wiki, Collaboration, Groupware, Online Communications, Enterprise Software, Software, Zack Whittaker

Update: I hit “publish” before the article was completely finished, so I’ve added some images and updated some links. I can’t pull the post without it leaving a trail behind it, so I may as well just own up now and say, “whoops, sorry”.

GroupSwim Collaboration, in a nutshell, is a SaaS social and business collaboration tool, solution, application - whatever you want to call it. With “Collaboration“, it’s a hosted service by GroupSwim which could well be used as a replacement for SharePoint. Although it doesn’t have all the features of SharePoint, it still works extremely well, if not better, than SharePoint in small to medium enterprises.

There are many key features of Collaboration: the main one is that it appears in forum and group form. It can be a central point of contact from a customer’s perspective to get in touch with after-sales care. With forums and groups, even wiki functions for small enterprises and businesses, there are some obvious similarities with Google Groups with some exceptions. One person can be part of different groups, and with AJAX and Web 2.0 (or as it’s an enterprise web application, Enterprise 2.0) style for the site, it boasts over-over tabs to get more detail on something before you look.

It can be served along side these features as a document repository. You can directly upload to a group, forum or wiki, attach to discussions you’re having with work colleagues or consultants, clients and customers, or email them in using your unique GroupSwim email which is provided for you.

But… the documents aren’t stored in GroupSwim. Everything’s taken through the wires to Amazon S3 which significantly increases repository security and decreases bandwidth costs.

Every file has a unique page - just as SharePoint does. However what interested me was the enterprise social network feel to it. It has a version tracker and a download counter, whilst behind the scenes it’s being indexed word for word, byte for byte. Because not everybody had the available plugins for viewing the documents, they use an API available from Scribd which provides the ability to access and preview those documents in full.

Web 2.0 features and the integrated wiki –>